Senator Barack Obama’s Rally in Minges

Senator Barack Obama's Rally in Minges
Senator Barack Obama speaks to the crowd inside Minges during his 2008 campaign rally. Image courtesy of John A. Tucker, Ph.D.

On April 17, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama (1961- ), then a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, staged a successful campaign rally at ECU in Minges Coliseum, helping to secure his standing as the frontrunner in what had been a close race with his rival, Hillary Clinton (1947- ). Two weeks after his Minges rally, Obama won the North Carolina primary by over 200,000 votes before going on to secure his party’s nomination and then, in the fall of 2008, to defeat his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain (1936-2018). In the general election, Obama carried North Carolina, albeit by a slender state margin of 14,000 votes out of 4.3 million cast, thus becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so since Jimmy Carter. While it’s impossible to say how much the Minges rally helped Obama win North Carolina’s electoral votes, it surely contributed. Also noteworthy is that Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, came to ECU in the fall of 2008 for an afternoon rally on the mall in front of Mendenhall Student Center. The Obama-Biden stops showed that the 2008 Democratic ticket cared about ECU and by extension eastern North Carolina.

In his Minges’ remarks, Obama explained to the crowd of mostly ECU students that he had decided to run for president because of “what Dr. Martin Luther King called the ‘urgency of now,’” adding that in his, Obama’s view, “the country is at a defining moment in its history….” He emphasized that “we can’t afford to wait to fix our schools. We can’t wait to fix our health care system. We can’t wait to bring good jobs and good wages right here to Greenville, North Carolina. We cannot wait to end global warming. We cannot wait to free ourselves from energy dependence. We cannot wait to bring this war in Iraq to a close.” That, Obama explained, was why he was running for president.

The Republican candidate for the presidency, Sen. John McCain, bypassed Greenville. However, in October, McCain’s running mate, Alaskan governor Sarah Palin matched, somewhat, Obama’s earlier draw with a rally in Minges before a crowd of 8,000. Hoping to undermine Obama’s appeal, Palin repeatedly questioned his patriotism by alleging ties to domestic terrorism and radical groups of the 1960s. Palin’s strategy fell flat, but her appearance in Minges further contributed to ECU’s continuing emergence as a powerful political venue in eastern N.C.

For many, the 2008 Obama rally in Minges recalled Sen. John F. Kennedy’s stop at College Stadium nearly fifty years earlier. Both candidates were sharp, youthful and articulate, and exceptionally popular with undergraduates and African Americans. However, unlike the Kennedy rally which, from start to finish went exceptionally well, Obama’s had an ominous ending. As the clear, sunny day waned, those leaving Minges witnessed a huge plume of smoke rising sky-high from west Greenville: the remains of the blighted Imperial Tobacco building had been torched by an arsonist. Whether coincidental or not, many who took pride just hours before in successfully welcoming Obama felt that the late-afternoon blaze had marred the occasion.

In the 2012 race against his Republican challenger, former Gov. Mitt Romney (1947- ) of Massachusetts, Obama did not return to Greenville. Instead, his wife, Michelle, appeared on his behalf for a September rally in Minges, drawing a crowd of 6,000. Earlier the same month, the Romney campaign had sent running mate Paul Ryan to ECU for a rally at the Student Recreation Center, with a video feed to Hendrix Auditorium in Mendenhall Student Center. Whether a result of Obama’s decision not to campaign more aggressively in North Carolina in person, Romney won the state’s electoral votes by a narrow margin of just under 2%, turning it red once more.

Of the presidential campaigns staged at East Carolina, Obama’s 2008 rally stands as one of the most historic largely because the candidate, though only a U.S. senator seeking his party’s nomination at the time, went on to win the state’s primary, the Democratic nomination, then the state’s electoral votes and the general election, becoming the first African American president of the United States and serving in that capacity for two terms. The 2008 rally and Obama’s win in North Carolina helped established that the campus and state had grown substantially beyond the culture of racial discrimination that defined its politics for much of the twentieth century. Politically, it’s hard not to see the 2008 Minges rally as a factor in Obama’s success in North Carolina that year, and his relative absence in 2012 as, conversely, contributing to his loss of the state. ECU was becoming a powerful venue for energizing the electorate and getting out the vote, one that candidates of either party might bypass at their own peril.

Sources

Additional Related Material

Senator Barack Obama speaks to the crowd inside Minges during his 2008 campaign rally. Image courtesy of John A. Tucker, Ph.D.

Senator Barack Obama speaks to the crowd inside Minges during his 2008 campaign rally. Image courtesy of John A. Tucker, Ph.D.

2008 Barack Obama campaign rally press credentials. Image courtesy of John A. Tucker, Ph.D.

2008 Barack Obama campaign poster. Image courtesy of John A. Tucker, Ph.D.

Flyer promoting Barack Obama's 2008 campaign rally. Image courtesy of John A. Tucker, Ph.D.

Citation Information

Title: The Obama Rally in Minges, 2008

Author: John A. Tucker, PhD

Date of Publication: 8/13/2020

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